Great questions @rajaraman. I’ll start with the second one—on the hiring front, we ask behavioral questions specific to customer-centricity.
This part is SUPER tricky because the answers you’d expect of a customer-centric candidate are exactly the opposite of what you’d want to hire. For example, one of the questions we ask is “let’s say you’re working at a burger restaurant, and a client walks in asking for spaghetti, what do you tell this client?”. You’d think a customer-centric candidate would go out of their way to make this customer happy, right? WRONG. If the candidate attempts to convince the client to stay by saying something like “we can make you a spaghetti burger!” or “let me talk to the kitchen and see what we can do” then they’re really focused on doing what they think is good for the restaurant. We want them to love the customer so much, that they’re willing to send them elsewhere if they know we don’t have what they need. So an ideal answer would be something like “let me get you directions to the best spaghetti restaurant in town”.
And back to the first question re: gaining and processing the customer insights. The first part is to create spaces where everyone in the company can have direct access to customers. We do this in a few ways, from scheduling daily calls with customers to creating a community group in Facebook where our customers talk to each other that each team member joins.
You’re asking specifically about operationalizing these insights, and the key here is not to create new processes, but to embed customer-centricity into all of the daily processes you’d have anyway.
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It starts with goals: OKRs typically map to company benefits, but if you map OKRs to customer benefits, then every single day, every single goal that each team member is working on will be tied to customer data. Then, when we have OKR syncs or updates, these inherently need and include customer insights.
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Roadmap planning: similarly, you’ll want to embed customer-centricity into your product roadmap planning. This one is hard because you really have to get your entire team to put ego aside. It’s very easy to fall in love with solutions and feature ideas, so you need to find a framework that can evaluate your features from a client perspective. We use two models here, one is the KANO model and the other is the Jar. First, we start by creating a list of all of the features that have been requested by customers and also include those that teams are very excited about or think are needed. All ideas are welcomed. The next step is to use the KANO model to categorize them according to what features will satisfy and delight customers. This step is critical because it also shows you how much time to invest in each feature. That way if one feature is basic (meaning customers will be dissatisfied if you don’t build it, but their delight won’t increase by much if you keep investing in it) then you know that you just need to build the bare minimum and liberate time to invest elsewhere. Similarly, it highlights many features that we internally get excited about because we nerd out on them but that our customers will be completely indifferent to, and we may not need to spend time on after all. Once we have this process completed and we have narrowed down the features we’ll be working on, we use the Jar model (this was shared by one of Airbnb’s PMs after reading a children’s book to her daughter) and it’s essentially the idea that you have one jar to fill with rocks, pebbles, and pixie dust. If you start filling it up with pixie dust or pebbles, your big rocks (big bets) will no longer fit. So you start by sizing all of the narrowed down features, pick a few big rocks to start with, then fill the rest of the jar accordingly. Pixie dust are features that typically require a day or two of one person’s time to create but end up majorly delighting customers (it’s much easier to identify these if you do the KANO model first.
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All hands: each all hands we have a space dedicated to a Customer Story. One person from the team picks a customer, they follow them for a week, get familiar with their business and their why, and then present the story to the whole company.
And so on. Again what’s worked best for us is not to create new processes since these could be distracting and too much process can slow us down, but to map each of our existing processes to customer benefits so we’re exercising daily without needing to go to the gym.
Let me know if this helps!